Chapter 5
The Final Furlong

Thursday 24 August, Hotel Alef II, Krakow, Poland

Welcome to the European Union

Oops! I have been a bit lazy at following up to our night on the tiles in Odessa. Suffice to say, it was quite an eye-opener and most red-blooded males/lesbians would have been in heaven.

The following morning we set off for somewhere between Odessa and Lviv, with the intention of probably camping. As the sun began to set, we pulled off the road and found a quiet wooded clearing to set up camp. Unlike in Russia, there were no killer mozzies, but instead we were bombarded by bugs that liked the look of the head-torch. After supper Ants had a bit of an accident and let out a yelp. I thought she had been stung (again), but it turned out that she had managed to get boiling water all over her right hand. Poor Ants ended up having my dirty T-shirt wrapped around her hand while I ferreted around in our medical kit and found a burn dressing. I then proceeded to bandage her up like a boxer, hoping that her injury would not stop her driving the rest of the trip back to the UK. It is a running joke between us that we don’t want the other one to get hurt in any way that will stop them driving. Much as we adore driving TT, we are not too keen to have the sole responsibility of driving her.

The following morning we dragged ourselves from our idiot-proof tent, packed up and hit the road for Lviv. As we arrived in the city it became quite apparent why it is a World Heritage Site. The combination of the attractive buildings and cobbled streets made quite an impression on me. Although our hotel was a bit tricky to find, it turned out to have a great location right on the main square.

The next day we had planned to explore Lviv, but we managed only a half-hearted attempt due to our ongoing problems with fatigue. I can understand why we get tired on this trip, but the fact that Ants and I seem to have spent most of the trip not sleeping soundly is extremely annoying and means we get a double dose of tiredness. When we get home I am going to get into my bed for 24 hours and not move.

That brings me on to yesterday. We left Lviv at 9 a.m. and hoped to be in Krakow in the evening. The border was only about 60 miles from Lviv, but we were delayed by TT suffering from a broken accelerator cable. We changed it, but I made the job a whole lot more challenging by removing the wire from its plastic sheath. At the border we joined a very long queue of 100 or so vehicles and had to wait for about three hours, which wasn’t too bad considering how many cars there were. Just as we neared the front of the queue, the heavens opened and TT had a shower. Not only was it raining but also it was cold. Ants and I shivered away, cursing the weather and border crossings.

After we had successfully left Ukraine, we had to wait for half an hour in no-man’s land before being processed by the Polish officials. This was the easiest entrance to a country we have encountered. As Poland is part of the EU, we didn’t need any stamps, visas, declaratzia, import papers, etc. They just entered TT’s and our details on the computer and we were free to go.

Poland, like Almaty, was a reverse culture shock. I have never seen so many road signs in my life, and Ants and I dry-retched when we came across a 24-hour Tesco, a Shell garage and a McDonalds, all within a couple of miles. Yuk! Multinationals like these are things that I have not missed about England.

The drive to Krakow was frustrating for a number of reasons. First, the road to Krakow passed through towns and villages with such frequency that it made driving a slow process and we constantly had to slow down to 25 mph. Second, TT started making the most unbelievable hissing sound. It was so loud that initially I thought it must be coming from some nearby roadworks. We pulled into a garage and I got on my back and had a poke around. I thought I had found the problem when I spotted that the hose from the air filter had come loose, so I resealed it and hoped that the hissing would stop. We drove along for a few miles before TT started making a racket again. The weird thing was that she didn’t always make a racket and the whistling came and went. By this time it was after 11 p.m and dark. The final challenge was lots and lots of roadworks, which meant more slow speeds. Still, I was driving in true granny style anyway because of TT’s hissing and the darkness.

We arrived at our hotel at 12.30 a.m. last night. I felt like it was 7 a.m. and I had been clubbing all night—not pleasant. Time for bed now. I am all blogged out.

Saturday 26 August, Old Town Apartments, Prague, Czech Republic

It’s not over until the fat lady sings

I’m not quite sure who the fat lady is, but this aphorism sprung to mind early yesterday morning as—with Jo at the wheel—a security guard, the local mechanic and I pushed a recalcitrant Ting Tong around a carpark in Oswiecim. As it had been a little chilly the night before, the Pink Lady’s spark plugs had once again revolted and said they weren’t going anywhere until they had warmed up. It was the fourth time in two days that Her Ladyship had caused us problems, reminding us that we may be nine-tenths of the way through our 14-week tukathon but it isn’t over ’til it’s over.

To our great relief her engine finally turned over and we turned out of our hotel carpark towards Prague, 320 miles away.

The last time I wrote a blog was in Lviv, when Jo and I had been too tired to appreciate the beauty of the place after two very long days on the road. After another bad night’s sleep, feeling far from refreshed, we set off early the next morning for Krakow, 185 miles away in Poland.

At 10.30 a.m., the first of the day’s incidents occurred when the accelerator cable suddenly went ping. Jo was asleep in the back and was rudely awoken by some bad language coming from the driver’s seat and the news that we were going to have to perform a mechanical procedure. Under a leaden sky, in biting wind, we extracted the toolbox and got to work. An hour and a half later we were on our way again, having had a few issues with pieces of wire not fitting where they were supposed to.

At about 1 p.m. we spotted a very, very long queue of cars, which signalled our arrival at the Ukraine-Poland border. The crossing was lengthy but uneventful, and four hours later we were in Poland, both very sad to be waving goodbye to Ladaland. We’ve spent six weeks in Russian-speaking countries and have met so many fantastic people and seen so many interesting things. Entering Poland, and the EU, meant saying farewell to all that we had become familiar with: clapped-out cars, outdoor showers, Kamaz trucks, gold teeth,Tartars, smetana, vodka and officious police. It also meant that we are well and truly embarking on the final leg of our journey and that our arrival in England is scarily imminent.

Driving into Poland was like entering a new world. Within ten miles we had spotted a Tesco and a McDonalds, those vile totems of westernisation. Gleaming BP and Shell garages were in place of their more dishevelled Ukrainian and Russian counterparts. A surfeit of shiny new road signs marched along the roadside, and everywhere the EU stars reminded you of Poland’s new identity. Never before have Jo or I seen so many road signs. It is as if Poland has gone overboard in an attempt to become a paradigmatic EU nation.

To complement our grey moods at having entered the western world, at about 5 p.m. the heavens opened, much to the disdain of TT’s temperamental sparks. They didn’t force us to a standstill but they did slow us down and the next few hours were accompanied by the sound of their spluttering disapproval. That and non-stop roadworks meant that at 10 p.m. we were still 60 miles short of Krakow…at which point Ting Tong threw yet another tukking tantrum, suddenly emitting an alarming hissing sound from within the depths of her engine. She’d hissed before, but this was a different matter, and Jo demanded that we stopped and investigated further. I was all for limping on to Krakow and dealing with the problem in the fresh light of morning, but Jo, being the sensible one, decided otherwise. So we pulled into the next petrol station and for the second time that day went through the rigmarole of unscrewing the driver’s seat to get into the engine. The chief mechanic, aka Jo, swiftly identified a large hole in the air hose, which, after a bit of fiddling, looked like it was sorted, and we carried on. Ten minutes later TT was hissing again, but this time we decided there was no more we could do, so we ploughed on to Krakow. We pulled up outside our hotel at 12.30 a.m., dizzy with fatigue, and after a glass of wine fell into bed and passed out. God, what a day—certainly our longest yet at fifteen and a half hours, and probably the hardest.

Krakow, like Lviv, is an incredibly beautiful city, with street upon street of architectural delights. And once again, like Lviv, we were far too exhausted to check it out. I didn’t actually get out of bed until 2 p.m. the next day, and we spent the afternoon ambling about, chilling in cafés and taking a horse-drawn carriage around the Old Town. What surprised us both was the volume of tourists and the number of American and English voices we heard amidst the crowds. Ukraine and Russia felt a world away and we both hankered for what we had left behind.

There’s an interesting legend about Krakow. Many moons ago, Lord Shiva threw seven magic stones towards seven parts of the world, one of which landed in Krakow, in the Wawel Castle. The places that had been hit were instantly imbued with the god’s energy and remain so to this day. The seven places, known as the world’s chakras, are Delhi, Delphi, Jerusalem, Krakow, Mecca, Rome and Velehrad. You may dismiss this as hippy nonsense, but apparently all sorts of dowsings, tests and divinings have been done here and numerous studies published, and they all seem to confirm there is something a little bit magic about this place.

The next morning we headed straight for the nearest mechanic and then south west out of Krakow, in the general direction of Prague. Our last stop in Poland was Oswiecim, better known by its German name,Auschwitz, synonymous with unfathomable cruelty and suffering. Under gathering rain clouds, we covered up TT and headed into Birkenau, the first of the two museums here. Birkenau, which held up to 100 000 prisoners, is where the Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and anyone else they felt like. Although the SS, sensing defeat, tried to cover up evidence of their atrocities, much of the camp still remains. As you wander amidst the barbed-wire fencing and blown-up gas chambers and crematoriums, you get a sense of the scale of the Nazi operation. It felt suitable that it was such a dank, miserable day. At the far end is a massive monument in memory of those who died here, which states, in every European language, ‘Let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to all humanity’. It’s shocking to think that what happened here was only 62 years ago and that so many innocents endured such horror.

Next stop was Auschwitz, two miles down the road. Established in 1940 for Polish political prisoners, Auschwitz was expanded in 1941-42 to take in European Jews from as far away as Corfu, Greece and Hungary. No one quite knows how many people died here and at Birkenau, since as the war progressed the Nazis didn’t bother registering their victims—they just unloaded them straight off the trains and into the gas chambers. Tragically, many of the Jews who arrived here had been duped by the Nazis into believing they had been transported for ‘resettlement’; the Nazis sold them non-existent plots of land and offered them work in fictitious shops and factories.

Of course I knew about the Holocaust before, and how disgustingly bigoted and cruel it was, but it wasn’t until we walked around Auschwitz that it truly sunk in, seeing those thousands of photographs and piles of belongings, reading about the tales of heroic resistance movements, and pondering the conditions in which the prisoners were forced to exist. Harrowing is not the word, and not for the first time history made me cry. Perhaps worst of all was a photograph of a woman who had weighed 11 stone when she arrived but a pathetic four stone when the photo was taken. As in Volgograd, I was left horrified at humanity’s capacity for cruelty and mass destruction.

Almost everyone knows about the Holocaust, but fewer people are aware of how badly the Poles suffered at the dual hands of Hitler and Stalin in the Second World War. Both men set out to wipe Poland off the map, again, and by 1945 Poland had lost over 20 per cent of its prewar population. Worst off were its intelligentsia, whom Hitler and Stalin feared the most. A total of 57 per cent of Poland’s lawyers, 40 per cent of its doctors and 30 per cent of its university lecturers were murdered by these two megalomaniacs. It is no surprise that the handful of Polish pilots who fought for us in the Battle of Britain were some of the most lethal fighters we had.

After seeing the museum, we spent the night at the unremarkable Hotel Glob. The next morning we had the debacle of TT refusing to start once again. By the time she got her act together it was 9.30 a.m., and off we sped towards the Czech border. I was only just beginning to get used to Polish zloty and having an almost recognisable alphabet, and it was time for another country.

Amazingly, the border crossing took a mere two minutes and was a matter of flashing our passports. Then 280 miles later, having cruised along immaculate Czech tarmac, we hit Prague. My, oh my, we were glad to get here last night and meet up with Jo’s pa. And wow, there are a lot of tourists here.

Tuesday 29 August, Prague, Czech Republic

No butt-surfing, please—we’re British

Our departure from Krakow on Saturday morning was delayed slightly by some TT mechanics as I poked around to try to find the source of the hissing and attempted to rethread the accelerator cable. Both jobs were unsuccessful, and a guy who was working in the hotel had to try and sort out my botched job. Next stop was a local mechanic. He managed to rethread the accelerator cable but didn’t really try to find the source of the hissing. Instead, he tightened her drive belt slightly. We didn’t feel particularly confident that she would be sorted, but we tukked off anyway and decided that we could stop at another mechanic if the hissing became unbearable.

Our next stop was Auschwitz. It was a suitably grey and drizzly day and the sites were very well designed to educate tourists about the atrocities committed. We left feeling a bit depressed that any human being could cause such suffering to other human beings, i.e. their brothers and sisters. However, it seems that leaders never really learn from the past, and our supposed democratic governments in the western world still think that it is justifiable to kill innocent women, children and men. In the case of the USA they pass it off as that rather vulgar euphemism ‘collateral damage’. There can never ever be any justification for killing innocent civilians, whether intentional or unintentional. When will some of the people in this world get it into their thick skulls that they are wrong?

The following morning we were up early for a long drive to Prague. Our darling TT decided that she didn’t want to start and so we had to enlist the help of a young mechanic to get her going. Once we were on our way the drive was OK, the highlight being driving TT at just over 70 mph on the Czech motorway, a tukking record. The border crossing was incredibly simple and took a mere two minutes—unbelievable.

I will now explain the title of this blog. Butt-surfing is not something that people do in the privacy of their bedrooms. What I am referring to is the behaviour that we call tailgating in England—basically, stupid drivers who think it is a great idea to get right up another vehicle’s ass. We have had to deal with this behaviour during the whole trip, but the faster the vehicles travel the more potentially lethal it becomes, regardless of whether the vehicle has ABS or not. We have seen so many accidents that have occurred as a direct result of butt-surfing, and therefore we drive TT a good two to four seconds behind the vehicle in front. Sometimes, the large gap we leave between ourselves and the vehicle in front is far too tempting for drivers behind us, and they force us to briefly butt-surf as they cut in right in front of us. Do people not realise that when you take control of a motorised vehicle you are in control of a potentially lethal piece of machinery? Dangerous driving also encompasses drink-driving, and anyone that indulges in either is an incredibly selfish idiot. I should have bought the sticker that I have attached to the back of my Vectra in England: ‘Unless you’re a haemorrhoid, keep off my ass.’

Thursday 31 August, Hotel Madison, Cologne, Germany

Bavarian sausage to eau de cologne

It’s 8 a.m., we’re in Cologne and very soon we have got to load up TT, hope she starts and tuk off to Brussels. Somewhere en route we are meeting up with a BBC cameraman who has come out to film us for the day, before we do a live feed from Brussels city centre tonight. Help.

Apart from that, I’m writing this in serious haste, so there is not really enough time to fill you in on all the details. I’ll just jot down some of the vital stats, as it were.

In the past few days we’ve tukked, in filthy rain and cold, from Prague to Cologne, via Bavaria, where we visited fellow tuk tuk enthusiasts Daniel and Susi. Last year they drove one of Anuwat’s tuk tuks over 23 000 miles from Bangkok to Germany, via Japan, Mongolia and Libya. We’d originally planned to tuk due west from Prague through Bohemia but, having been in touch with Daniel and Susi since February, couldn’t resist the minor diversion to Bavaria in order to give Ting Tong a chance to flirt with another tuk tuk and swap tukking tales. They fed us pizza, and Daniel spent the whole evening and next morning helping us with TT, who is being a Bad Girl. We’re having problems with her every day now, and I’m having visions of her falling apart at the finishing line in Brighton in a comedy fashion. The most serious problem is her veering to the right, which we can’t get to the bottom of. Daniel and Jo tried everything yesterday—changing the wheel, putting on a new calliper, changing the disc brakes, removing washers…I think she probably needs new front shocks, but there is nothing we can do about that until we get back to England.

With TT patched up as best as we could manage, we hit the autobahn for Cologne, in the north of Germany. The Chinese and Russians may take the biscuit for bad driving, but the sheer speed of the traffic on the autobahn was as scary as any crazed Dong Fong driver. While we cruised along at a steady 60 mph the other cars zoooooomed past at well over 120 mph. It must be a funny sight: Porsche, BMW, Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche,VW…Ting Tong.

The police must have thought it was a funny sight too for, as we were about to come off the autobahn last night, some blue sirens appeared behind us and we were pulled over. The two policemen were convinced that it was illegal for us to be driving a Ting Tong on their autobahn and held us up for half an hour while they checked all our documents, questioned us and made a number of phone calls. Much to their dismay, they couldn’t find any valid reasons to tick us off, and we tukked off smugly towards Cologne, where we got extremely lost and quite cross trying to find our hotel.

Cologne provided us with another reverse culture shock—multiculturalism. It’s something we take for granted in England but have barely encountered since Bangkok. Our hotel is owned by Albanians, the cleaner here is Chinese and we ate at an Italian restaurant late last night. Welcome to the western world, or, as our hotel owner on our first night in Germany said,‘Welcome to civilisation’.

We’ve got just two days left of this journey. I can’t get my head around it, but at the moment we are so occupied with the matter of getting Ting Tong home that there isn’t the headspace to worry about what Sunday will be like or what will happen after.

That’s all for now, as we’ve got to hit the road to Brussels.

Friday 1 September, Brussels, Belgium

Feeling a bit frazzled

It’s the first time I’ve blogged for a few days, so I’ll recap a bit. We had a lovely weekend in Prague with my dad, and it was a chance for Ants and I to chill out, eat some seriously good food, catch up on our sleep and make the final plans for our last week on the road. I have to admit that I don’t think Prague quite lives up to its glowing reputation. Yes, it is a lovely city, but it didn’t bewitch me like Lviv and Krakow. There were too many tourists and I found the city a little too quaint and sterile. Plus the road system is a real headache, and we ended up getting very lost and nearly driving into the path of a tram. I think I prefer to share the road with donkey carts than trams.

On our final morning in Prague, we went to a press conference at the British embassy, which was a less hectic affair than our experiences in Kazakhstan and Thailand. As always, it was good to be able to talk about mental health and Mind and a pleasure to meet the diplomats, who were so kind and hospitable towards us. It is an honour to be invited to take part in a press conference with the embassy, not only in Prague but also Bangkok and Almaty. It gives our trip a voice that we wouldn’t have otherwise.

When we said goodbye to Dad there were no tears, because I knew I would be seeing him in a matter of days at the finishing line—providing we make it. TT has been misbehaving, and her issues of not starting and veering to the right have been causing us a huge amount of anxiety.

As we tukked west through the Czech Republic towards Germany, we raced against some ominous-looking rain clouds, which finally caught up with us as we approached the border with Germany. It was raining so much that I expected the old spark-plug issues to start at any moment. The thought of breaking down on the autobahn in the pouring rain and darkness was not our idea of fun, and so we went straight to the nearest hotel.

The following day the weather was still bad, although cats and dogs had been replaced by drizzle. But since we were on a tight schedule to get back to Brighton on time, we had to push on. Eventually TT started and we set off for our next engagement, with another very special tuk tuk and his parents, Daniel and Susi. I won’t repeat Ants, but suffice to say it was a great moment meeting Daniel and Susi, because nobody understands what we have experienced as much as they do. Even though we had only exchanged brief emails and spoken once on the phone, I felt a strong bond with them. Their tuk tuk was good-looking, but not nearly as beautiful as TT. Funnily enough, theirs didn’t even have a name or gender, but I think it was definitely a boy. Daniel spent a good couple of hours trying to get TT running better, but she was having none of it and was still being a right little madam. I think she just needs a damn good service, some new front shocks and a holiday.

I don’t know what it is about Western Europe, but it’s been one of the most stressful parts of our journey. We had both expected this last leg to be the easiest, but I would say that the exact opposite has been the case, due mainly to TT’s troubles and the constant bad weather. Also, we were bound to feel slightly strange towards the end of an adventure like this, and I think the combination of many things has contributed to our anxious moods. We are so close to home now and although I am really sad that this adventure is drawing to an end, my mind is racing ahead to the finishing line.